Court in Burundi on Tuesday sentenced the former President Pierre Buyoya (in absencia) to life in imprisonment for involvement in assassination of former Burundi president, Melchoir Ndadaye.
The sentence was passed to Buyoya alongside 18 others after they were found guility of carrying out an attack against the authority of state and participating in an attempt to bring massacre and devastation to Burundi.
Buyoya who is currently African Union (AU) high representative in Mali & the Sahel, was in 2018 issued with international arrest warrant for alleged involvement in assassination of Burundi’s first Hutu president.
Nadaye was killed in October, 1993 just days after he was sworn in as president.
Buyoya’s assassination sparked an array of brutal tit-for-tat massacres between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups, and ultimately sparked the decade-long Burundi Civil War.
A United Nations investigation into Ndadaye’s murder, the result of which was released in 1996, accused the army command of being responsible for the assassination and of being complicit in the resulting massacres by Tutsi troops. The report did not name specific figures as being responsible, but Buyoya, Ndadaye’s predecessor as president, has long been suspected of having some role in the assassination.
